Pages

Monday, April 04, 2011

Fair Play: I started a joke

BACK in the days of Philfootball.info, the regular meeting place of Pinoy fans all over the world, we had quite a shock when the then admin Vince Arriola announced, after the site went down, that the forum was getting attacked by Russian hackers.

At first we thought it was a joke. Why would hackers bother with a forum for Pinoy football?

The attack erased what for me was the most precious of all threads in all the forums that I visit. It was simply titled: “What do we call the national team?”

I’ve always wanted to learn the identity of the guy who first proposed the name, Streets of Blue or, in his words, “Calle Azul, or Azul Calle, or AzCal for short.”

That was how the legend of the Azkals was born.

What a thread it was, laid to waste by damn hackers.

The attack—for the life of me, I never knew why they bothered with the forum—would happen again twice.

Last week, Arielle Cruz (who almost became the coach of the Azkals last April 1), the web admin of www.pinoyfootball.com, now the home of Pinoy fans, had a similar experience, though in a good way.

Cruz wrote that during the Philippines vs. Bangladesh match in the AFC Challenge Cup, the server administrator shut down the site because, “he suspected that Pinoyfootball.com was being attacked by a botnet.”

That’s just the geekspeak for “he can’t believe all these people were visiting a website for Pinoy football so it must be a glitch!”

Of course, there was no attack.

People visited the site to get the latest updates from the game since there was no live telecast of the matches. That, and the Tweetcasts, showed there is massive interest in the game and that ABS-CBN scored a coup when it got the right to air the Azkal matches.

Speaking of the matches, I finally got to see the first half in full of the Azkals vs.

Bangladesh game. I skipped the first two because I was pissed with how Studio 23 presented a pre-match analysis of a replay. (Seriously, guys? What were you thinking!)But I also had to skip the second half of the game because the video quality was horrendous and you couldn’t even read the players’ jerseys.

Boy, I never appreciated ABS-CBN more during that game. The videos of the Myanmar game were provided by the host country and it was a generation behind the quality of the Feb. 9 videos.

Watching the telecast, I was also reminded of an April Fools’ story I wrote about three years ago.

No it wasn’t about the one where the PFF president resigned. Then, I also wrote that to get maximum publicity for product placements, Pinoy commentators of Filipino football matches would start including the ads in their spiel.

“The phrase, ‘uminom ng Alaxan, para di sumakit ang ulo’ will be used after every header, while the phrase, ‘isang malakas na sipa mula sa Red Horse’ will precede every shot at goal.

‘Wag mag-alala, tatayo pa rin yan basta may Viagra,’ will be repeated twice if player gets hit in his ‘crown jewels.’”

They did no such thing, of course, but they had the halftime reminder for each half, the McDonalds man of the moment, and the “You are watching…” reminders, as if guys will forget what they’re watching.

I thought they were a bit tacky and wanted to write about it but I realized, I shouldn’t be complaining at all. I was watching Philippine football on Philippine TV and if somebody said that exactly a year ago that we would all be doing that now, he’d be laughed at for being three days late from April Fools’ Day.

By the way, did you hear the one about the Philippines making the third round of the World Cup qualifiers...